Scottish opera singer's big decision to help save her voice after cancer

“I have a key to my little church in Greenwich where I can practice,” she said. “I sat in there for about three hours and I just I thought, this could be the last time I ever get to sing the things I love, the women [roles] that I have dreamed my whole life of singing.

“This might be the last day that I have this privilege to make these noises, to sing this music, so I sang every single thing that I would ever want to sing in my career, in case my voice died the next morning on the operating table.”

Before her diagnosis, Ms McGhee, then 28, who trained at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland before doing a postgraduate course at the Royal College of Music in London, was reaching the peak of her career. Originally from Motherwell, she had secured an audition at the National Opera Studio, a prestigious training ground for the country’s best opera singers.

She said: “I was 28 and I thought, this is it, this is my moment. My voice felt like it had just cooked. I felt like, finally, my voice is perfectly aligned with the roles that I would sing.

“And then I found a lump in my neck while warming up for a concert.”

She travelled to Basel, where she performed at the city’s Opera House and visited her GP the day she returned, where she was told the lump was probably a blocked saliva gland.

“She said, ‘you’re fine’. I said to her, ‘I’m an opera singer and this is my life. If something is growing in my throat, I don't know if it's near my voice. So is there any chance that, just because of my job, you would let me have a scan for this?’”

The GP agreed, but told Ms McGhee she was sure the lump would have gone by the time of the scan six weeks later. It had not.

After the scan, she received a phone call telling her to see her doctor as soon as possible.

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“Nine o'clock the next morning, I went into the GP, and he just started bombarding me with words like ‘tumour’, ‘biopsy’, ‘surgery’ and I just started crying,” she said.

“I told them, ‘you just can't open this [her throat] up’. ‘I can't lose this [her voice] as you don't understand, my life is actually going very well. It's finally all coming together. I feel like I'm on like a springboard, ready to jump into something really good.’”

Her doctors were not deterred.

The night before surgery to remove the tumour, the last piece she sang was Vissi d'arte from the opera Tosca, by Giacomo Puccini.

“In that point in the opera, she's having this horrendous dilemma in her life,” said Ms McGhee. “And this aria is a quasi prayer, a cry out for help. It's really saying, all I've done in life is love art and love love. I'm a good person and I don't know why you suddenly put me in this horrible position.

“It's just perfection. And I thought, ‘well, if this is the last thing I ever sing, it’s a bit of a dream role’.

“Ironically, Tosca has actually now become one of the most common roles that I do.”

After the operation, she decided - in a move which she admits, with hindsight, was not the best - to go ahead with the National Opera Studio audition three weeks later. For the first ten days following the surgery, she had been barred from singing a single note.

“I had to stop, my throat felt like it was going to rip open,” she said. “Needless to say, I didn’t get in.”

It took her three years to get her voice back fully, during which time she collapsed during a performance of Handel’s Messiah at Glasgow’s City Halls, when she discovered the insides of her throat had twisted since her operation.

“It was absolutely horrific,” she said. “I was singing ‘rejoice’ and I just ended up on the floor. That has haunted me and has been incredibly difficult for me to get over, because it ended up going into a sort of performance PTSD with panic attacks that every time I opened my mouth, it would happen again.”

She had been advised to have a second surgery to remove the other side of her thyroid - as well as undergoing radiotherapy - as a preventative measure to stop the cancer from returning.

However, she decided that was too big a risk to her singing career.

“This was not a decision that I made lightly,” she said. “I always advocate for people making the decision that works best for your life at the time of your diagnosis. I don't have children, and if I did, I would maybe have made a different decision to make sure that my cancer didn't return, for the sake of me being here for my children.

“But what I have is my voice, so I chose to protect her, which for me, meant not having the operation.”

Nine years on, a currently benign tumour is growing on her thyroid, which is being monitored.

“It’s a bit like playing Russian roulette, but for my career, and that is a decision that I would make time and time again,” she said. “I can’t have another operation, I have made it by the skin of my teeth, so we're looking at other treatments that we might do if this tumour continues to grow.”

She has met other cancer survivors, including a wine taster who lost his sense of taste through chemotherapy.

She said: “For me, was the loss of my top notes, which I find incredibly difficult to make my peace with. It was that special calling card I would just put at the end which would open the door to certain roles that were available.”

Now, aged 37, she is enjoying a return to her solo career. She made her debut last year with the English National Opera, where she won a key role playing Mary Beaton, a companion of Mary Queen of Scots, which she performed for the first time on the eighth anniversary of her cancer diagnosis.

“There were a lot of feelings that day,” she said. “Then shortly after that, I made my Italian debut. That felt like a big step forward.

“Yes, it has taken a lot longer, and yes, it has taken a lot out of me, but it's for me, it's absolutely been worth it, taking that curtain call as a principal.”

Ms McGhee is a guest of honour at Cancer Research UK’s Business Beats Cancer dinner at Prestonfield House, Edinburgh on 14 May.